Hi Richard

I was just a lowly sophomore peon in a class of mostly upperclassmen
who had started the project a few years before I went to skewl there.

The project was a side assignment for extra credit that just seemed to
carry on for all the years I was there and a few years thereafter.

I was an avid model railroader quite adept at building miniature
structures to emulate their full sized counterparts.
This was my contribution to the project, the modeling end of it.
When a new building was built in the town, I would make a scale model
of it for the project layout board.
I had to pay special attention to what objects of a structure
consisted of metal components and how they were attached to the
structure and if they led to a grounding source, as all of these
factors played an important part in the experimentation that was going
on.

I knew what the project was about and what they were trying to prove
with it. But I truly was not that interested in the purpose of the
project as much as I was in the authenticity of detail in the
structures used on the project layout board.

In other words, I learned just enough to be dangerous in my
observations, hi hi.....

However, the success ratio of known lightning strikes to the red zones
on our layout board was phenominal.
The data was collected by a whole different team than the team I was
on, but the layout board was loaded with bright orange lightning bolts
glued to places of known lightning strikes and all but 2 of them were
in our red zones.

I should note that a red zone was simply a 1/8 to 1/4 inch wide line
drawn on for example, the edges of gutters, at certain elevations on
taller structures not shielded by another object.

Naturally we did not know about many lightning strikes that did no
damage or were not observed.

My own antenna farm has been hit several times, but never was their
any damage because of it.

In fact, one year we had a strange phenomenon that caused neighbors to
call the fire department on a couple occassions. One of my Yagi's
appeared to have orange sparks flying from it, sometimes for as long
as a half-hour, but usually only for a few seconds or minutes. I was
only priviledged to see this myself in person one time. Scared the
bejesus out of me when I did too!

One of the firemen knew a man who worked on tall commercial chimneys
or something like that and told him about it.
The many came to my house, checked a few things out, talked to a
couple of neighbors and showed them some photo's he had taken of a
similar phenominon on other structures.
Turns out what was happening was weather conditions and the charge in
the air was just right to cause what was termed as St. Elmo's Fire, a
phenominon discovered on old sailing ships at sea during a storm.

I lived in that house roughly 20 years and this only happened for one
short rainy season in only one of those years. I had never heard of a
similar occurrance to ham antenna's before or after this event.
And I've been licensed for 45 years!

TTUL
Gary